Eduard Volodarsky

Eduard Volodarsky, who has died aged 71, was a Russian screenwriter whose
refusal to accept the official version of history got him into trouble with
the Soviet authorities.

Eduard VolodarskyPhoto: ALAMY

5:33PM BST 16 Oct 2012

Volodarsky worked closely with the director Alexei German on several of his classic masterpieces, most notably Trial on the Road (1971) and My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), as well as on a number of films by Nikita Mikhalkov. Volodarsky’s most celebrated collaboration with German, Trial on the Road, was inspired by a real-life case and concerns a young Red Army sergeant who, overcome by despair, has surrendered to the Nazis and agreed to collaborate. As the film opens, he changes sides again and allows himself to be captured by his own people. His loyalties are questioned and he is forced to prove his patriotism on the battlefield through a series of increasingly dangerous missions.

The film raised the taboo subject of collaboration during the Second World War and the rough treatment many former Soviet PoWs received on their return to Russia (“There are no prisoners of war,” Stalin once proclaimed, “only traitors to their homeland”). It therefore posed a direct challenge to the official orthodoxy that the “Great Patriotic War” was a conflict with no moral ambiguities. The Soviet film censors immediately banned the film for “de-heroicising Soviet history” and even ordered the studio to pay compensation for the money “wasted” on the project.

In his other great collaboration with German, My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Volodarsky scripted a story of people “building socialism” in a small town somewhere on the bleak Siberian plain. The film is presented as the recollections of a man who, in 1935 (on the eve of Stalin’s “Great Terror”), was a nine-year-old boy living with his father in a communal flat shared with police investigator Ivan Lapshin and a number of other characters.

On the surface, the characters have unbreakable faith in Comrade Stalin and the socialist ideal, but there is a yawning gulf between the dream and the reality and, for a Soviet audience, there would have been no mistaking the ironic meaning of the disaster which takes place in the Soviet Boy Scouts’ science project in which a fox and some chickens are supposed to be living in harmony. Towards the end of the film, as Lapshin announces “I’m going on a course”, his words are left hanging in the air, leaving the audience to imagine the fate which awaits him.

Both films remained on the shelves of the Ministry of Culture until 1986, when they were released during the era of perestroika and were recognised as classics.

Even so, missing from the credits of Trial on the Road were the names of all those crew members who had emigrated to the United States.

Eduard Yakovlevich Volodarsky was born on February 3 1941, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and trained at the All-Union Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. He had his first success with the script for Nikita Mikhalov’s At Home Among Strangers (1974), an “ostern” (Russian Western) in which a group of Bolshevik soldiers returning from the Russian Civil War with a precious shipment of gold are waylaid by bandits.

As well as his works for cinema, Volodarsky also wrote some 10 stage plays.

In 2000 he provided the script for the documentary Ordinary Bolshevism, which drew on recently declassified documents proving Lenin to be the true architect of the horrors more usually associated with Stalin, including the purges and the gulags.

When the Russian television channel Rossiya 1 wanted someone to script a television series based on Vasily Grossman’s sprawling Second World War epic Life and Fate (1959), Volodarsky was the obvious choice.

The work had been banned for three decades due to its depiction of the war on the Eastern Front as a struggle in which the common people are caught between two comparable totalitarian states. The first episode of Volodarsky’s adaptation was screened on Sunday.